Loaves and fishes in reverse
Global hunger and the meat-based dietBy James Van Alstine

How can a hamburger feed a hungry village? It’s a sort of
biblical loaves and fishes miracle. Well, loaves anyway. The fishes were likely
added later as a Christian analogy. To feed the village, we’ll need to multiply
that hamburger. To accomplish this modern miracle, we need only follow the
burger back up through its production process and return to grain. A quarter
pound of beef requires four pounds of grain, 650 gallons of water and 55 square
feet of forest.1 We could instead take that same four pounds of grain and bake
eight loaves of bread weighing a pound each.2 If each loaf is shared among three
people, 24 people are fed; a small village, but a fed village.

One big rice bowl

Is it really the same grain fattening the rich that could be
feeding the poor? Very often, it turns out to be so. A century and a half ago,
Ireland was ravaged by famine. The poor had come to depend upon a single crop,
the potato and when that crop failed, millions hungered. Since those events,
people have attempted to understand the forces that led to the Great Famine.
Throughout the peak famine years of the 1840’s, Ireland exported beef to the
affluent of England while the Irish peasantry gnawed on the grass of roadside
ditches. It is a social injustice some go so far as to call genocide. But that
was years ago in an age of empire and callous industrial times. Contemporary
famine must me different, right?

Sadly the pattern of famine in food exporting lands continues.
In 1984, at the peak of Ethiopia’s worst famine year in living memory that
impoverished African land was exporting plant crops for use as feed for European
livestock.3

Ethiopia was not an isolated incident. Around 80 percent of
the world’s 150 million malnourished children live in countries with food
surpluses, much of which is used as feed for animals who become the food of
affluent people.4

As economies become evermore global, the links between
consumption patterns in developed countries become more tangibly linked to the
economies of struggling developing lands. In a world where 840 million people
are malnourished and six million children age five and under die each year of
hunger, the question of animal product consumption is not a mere matter of taste
but a crucial issue of social justice.

“The consumption by a privileged few of grain-fed beef [and
other animal products] while millions go without the minimum daily caloric
requirements is one of the most critical issues confronting contemporary
civilization,” wrote Jeremy Rifkin. “The politics of diet is essential to
addressing the question of human survival in the coming century.”5

The cry of the poor

How is it that so much needed food is going to livestock feed?
Author Joel Cohen explains, “They [the poor] cannot compete for grain with the
cattle and chickens of the world’s wealthy people. The extremely poor are
irrelevant to international markets; they are economically invisible. But they
are people nonetheless.”6

Sadly, the very forces that should and might have encouraged
plant-based subsistence farming often urged leaders of developing nations to
follow the wasteful pattern of western animal-based food production.7 The United
Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United States Agency for
International Development (USAID) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation
and Development (OECD) are among the agencies that have driven poor countries up
the protein ladder toward unsustainable animal agriculture.8

The agribusiness giants of the United States and Europe,
rather than the hungry of the world, are those who benefit from exporting the
animal agriculture production model. Multinational corporations including
Ralston Purina and Cargill (a top US meat producer) have been given incentives
to set up grain-fed poultry operations in poor countries.9 In a new twist on
this exploitive theme, Monsanto (PCBs, Agent Orange, Bovine Growth Hormone) has
of late been dumping genetically modified grain into the developing world and
buying up seed companies while Europe refuses the stuff and American consumers
grow more skeptical of Frankenfoods.10

Whenever a famine spikes in the developing world, the evening
news is briefly rich with images of cargo planes shipping vital grain to
famished masses. American hearts swell with pride and deservedly so. Such
emergency airlifts bring staple grains directly to people in need, saving
countless lives. It is when the emergency is abated and the routine of
first-world over third-world economic development is practiced that imprudence
reigns. Two thirds of all the grain exported from the United States serves as
feed for livestock instead of vital staple food for poor people.11

Bread or burgers

Can’t we feed the hungry and the livestock too? If all the
greed and imprudence of the world were instantly cured, perhaps we could have it
both ways, but not for long. Author and Cornell professor, David Pimentel has
crunched the numbers on land and water use, agricultural production, and human
population and concludes farms won’t meet world food needs if current patterns
continue. Quality undeveloped farmland is scarce. Higher yields have seen their
peak. Although today’s wheat varieties produce four times the yield of 1940’s
varieties, Pimentel says: “Any plant geneticist can rapidly improve a
traditional variety of grain, but it’s much harder to continue to improve plants
that are already yielding several times more than their predecessors.”12

Many believe a crucial decision looms before us: livestock or
people. “As the population rises, structural global famine will be avoided only
if the rich start to eat less meat,” writes George Monbiot. “Within as little as
10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues
to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It
cannot do both.”13

A significant shift to a vegan diet holds great hope of making
a species-saving difference. If all the world immediately became vegan, the
picture of future sustainability in world food supplies improves greatly. “Right
now, only four billion of the world’s 5.6 billion are adequately nourished,”
says David Pimentel, “but if the entire world switched to a vegan diet, our food
production could properly nourish seven billion people.”14

Although vegan power can save the world’s hungry, caution need
be applied. Switching from a meat- based diet to a vegan diet would free huge
amounts of plant crops, agrarian land, water and other resources, but there is
no guarantee that these resources would shift to serve the poor. Rather, greed
could prevail and the resources could simple fall out of production or shift to
some other unimaginably wasteful consumption pattern serving the wealthy of the
world. On the brighter side lies hope and potential. Compassionate consumption
acted upon in the choice of a vegan diet opens the possibility of a well-fed
world through generations to come. As our village grows to seven billion people,
every vegan extends a compassionate hand to the world’s hungry today and extends
a ray of hope for people everywhere in years to come.